[ CLOSED ] playing with prodigal sons

[aceslow]

Who ⬤ Kim & Andromache
What ⬤ A late-night chat.
When ⬤ Mid-August.
Where ⬤ Out in the city
Content Warnings ⬤ Frank discussions about alcoholism and addiction.


[ There is nothing like watching someone you care for flush themselves down the drain.

Kim has watched it again and again, right from his youth to where he is now, far too old to still be dealing with this sort of thing, and yet here he is again. While most shifts he's able to simply ignore the fact that he is aiding and abetting in many addictions, he's been finding it more and more difficult to ignore. The same faces come in day in and day out. It seems perfectly innocent at first. Kim had been young once too, had spent his time buying packs of cigarettes and six-packs of beers for him and his friends to sit on the curb and down, shotgutting cans and spluttering and choking as they laughed at each other's failures. But by now, he's realized that it's the same people coming in every day, and they're not buying six-packs for them and their buddies. They're the customers that keep business afloat. They're the ones that need it, every single day.

And every single day, Kim gives it to them. It had been easy to compartmentalize at first, but it has begun to get underneath his skin, clawing and scratching at it, the acknowledgment that he is helping someone - someone with people who love them - slowly kill themselves, drop by drop. It's after a particularly bad shift that he finds himself in the company of Andromache for the evening smoke that they often share, Andromache just getting off duty in her work as a police officer, Kim still in his horrific red polyester uniform.

Tonight, he's moodier than usual, sucking down his cigarette like he's got a personal grudge against it. It helps that at this hour, in this part of the city, they're sitting in absolute isolation, the tips of their cigarettes burning a dark red in the absence of a functional streetlight, the only sounds that greet them the raucous noise from a bar a block or so away. He twists his neck to one side with a resounding crack, then finally speaks, more mutter than anything else. ]

I've got to get another job.

Comments

[killtime]

[ Andy doesn't have the excuse of foolish youth anymore. Hers are simply bad habits, ingrained over the long centuries. She should probably quit — the smoking, the drinking, the fucking. This body — this mortal flesh — it isn't so invulnerable as the cursed meat she inhabited when she was immortal. But there's a lot of things she probably should do. Too many things, really. But she's a creature of habit, and it's like they say — old dog, new tricks.

So the evening finds her lighting up a fresh cigarette, her crumpled pack nearly empty as she shoves it back into her pocket. Smoke curls lazily from her mouth as she exhales with the practiced ease of an addict, breathing poison into her lungs without a thought for consequences.

When Kim speaks, she gives him a curious little look, letting her cigarette burn between her fingers for a moment while she answers wryly: ]

Quitting the gas station? Are you tired of being harassed for booze and smokes at three AM?

[aceslow]

Tired of selling booze to alcoholics.

[ Andromache could count herself among them. She's a heavy drinker. Heavy smoker. Heavy fighter. She's a woman of many habits, most of them bad -- for as well as she manages to carry these habits, it doesn't mean that they don't exist. She's probably not the right person to talk to about this, but Kim isn't even meaning to talk about it at all. It's just something that's been gnawing incessantly on his mind, and it's starting to have an impact on his daily life. ]

No offense meant, [ he says, as though it's less offensive to accuse your friend of being an alcoholic. ] It doesn't matter who's selling it to them. They'll get it anyhow. But it's...

[ He takes a long drag off his cigarette, lets the smoke escape from his mouth in a long, elegant plume. ]

Depressing.

[ The same people. The same drinks. Every single day. They're killing themselves by inches, will kill themselves by inches no matter what Kim has to say about it. But he doesn't have to be the one selling it to them. ]

[killtime]

[ She should probably feel guilty, being one of those alcoholics that regularly inconveniences the lieutenant — and maybe she does, a little bit — but Andy has never suffered from a lack of self-awareness. Denial, sure. Dishonesty, constantly. But she knows what kind of creature she is. A creature of vices. Vices that she's used to make the last several thousand years more bearable. She is, after all, only human — and there's only so much a human can take.

Still, it doesn't feel like he was talking about her. This is about something else, isn't it? And her mind wanders a certain way instinctively with this subject matter — she wonders if this is going to be about Harry. ]

So wash your hands of it. [ She'll miss this. Miss having these late hours with him. But she'll survive being without. When was the last time she heard Kim express what he wanted for himself anyway? She's not so selfish that she'd stand in his way. ] We both know you're fucking wasted in this place anyway.

[ A half-beat, then a bit quietly: ]

There's too much sadness in this world that we can't escape. But you could just walk out of this shithole tonight.

[aceslow]

[ Kim stares up at the moon as Andy talks. She's a perspicacious woman. It is difficult to tell if she's talking about the job or something else. It could be taken both ways, he supposes, but he's never been one to walk out of anything. Much to his detriment. He could have walked off of a road of unhappiness a long time ago. Another version of Kim Kitsuragi saw the RCM for what it was and walked out, took up some nice, boring job that paid well enough to maintain a lifestyle of quiet happiness. Found a nice, boring man to spend the rest of his days with, having unremarkable sex and unremarkable conversation. Perhaps that Kim Kitsuragi is a happier man. Perhaps that Kim Kitsuragi stops chasing after things that he knows will hurt him in the end -- for what? The love of it? It has never done him any favours before. ]

Mmh. [ Ash collects on the tip of his cigarette, forgotten. It falls on his boot. ] And where would I walk to, exactly? You'd be the first to recognize how limited our options are.

[ He doesn't specify what he means by that. ]

[killtime]

[ Maybe this isn’t fair of her to say. She’s always had the luxury of her own whims. Her power, her curse - for all the suffering it brought her, it also gave her the liberty of impulsiveness. She ran when she wanted to run. No force could keep her if she truly didn’t wish to stay. And anything that might tether her to one place - it was all transient. Temporary.

She considers Kim’s question for a long moment, her own cigarette burning idly as it hangs from her fingers. Her dark eyes rest on his distinct profile, taking in the details of the man before she finally answers: ]

Maybe it doesn’t matter where. [ A soft exhale, not quite a sigh. ] As long as it’s something else. Something new.

[ Wryly then, as she glances away: ]

This place is beneath you anyway.

[aceslow]

New is never something I've been particularly good at.

[ Never. He sinks his teeth into something, and then he refuses to let go. It's just the way he's always been. But this isn't really about the job. Not really. He had been content, if frustrated, before, and he knows there's one very obvious reason why it is now sticking in his craw. But if he wanted to talk about it with Andromache, the words get stalled, sputter out, die. To share such a thing with one of his friends would be insensitive, unkind. And for Kim to discuss his worry so frankly, how much he truly cares even if he's certain that Andy already knows --

It is difficult for him. He's never known how to change that. He looks away, refusing to meet Andy's steadfast gaze straight-on. ]

And I wouldn't say it's beneath me. It's not as though I have many marketable skills in a place like this. [ It is not humility. It is fact; every skill he has spent his life painstakingly developing has been for a singular purpose. Without that purpose, he is lost, astray. ]

If you could choose something else, what would you do?

[killtime]

[ They're very different creatures, the two of them — but maybe they're alike in that way. How stubborn they can be with these things. How resistant to change. Andy is more set in her ways than most, and for all the different lives she's led, all the different paths she's walked — somehow, she always ends up returning to the same thing. Always solving her problems the same way. Always making a home out of the same old vices.

Maybe someone else would have used the last several thousand years to become something novel, to grow and learn — but she didn't choose that, did she? So many lessons she chose not to learn. So many mistakes repeated. She still carries her mother's old axe. The same labrys that the queen wielded in battle over six millennia ago. ]

...I'd probably build a farm somewhere. Somewhere far away, in the middle of fucking nowhere. Raise some animals. Plant some crops. [ She hadn't expected to be so honest, but that always seems to happen with Kim, doesn't it? After all they've been through — all he's seen of her — it seems beside the point to lie. ] What about you? [ Wryly then: ] You miss being a cop?